This chapter concerns itself primarily with the idea of India as it emerges in both global imagination as well as the imagination of prominent Indian intellectuals and academics through their engagement with religion in the late nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. The growth of the discipline of comparative religion, the establishment of the modern school and university system in India, the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, and related to all of these, the pressing question of the status and role of India, as a nation and a civilization, on a global platform form the context of this exploratory piece. I take as granted the principle that modern disciplines and their disciplinary frameworks and horizons—as we understand them— in their methodological and epistemic formulations evolve in a systematic fashion by the late nineteenth century, thereby making this period a critical one to examine. Given the central role played by Hinduism as a religious and cultural system in recent years in buttressing India's civilizational claims on a global scale, this chapter tries to unravel the interconnections and fissures between the academic study of religion, the pedagogy of religion, and the intellectual and cultural burden borne by religion in the making and remaking of the idea of India over the twentieth century.

In her landmark contribution to the study of nationalism, Manu Goswami pointedly notes that ‘[c]entral to the project of nationalism is making the nation appear natural’ (Goswami 2004: 1). By ‘natural’, she means a timeless, ahistorical, and yet deeply territorial understanding of the nation—a task that she notes was executed admirably by the nationalist elite of colonial India. Goswami's primary site of inquiry in producing this ‘natural’ nation is the nation's political economy.